Marco Maggi
Marco Maggi | Slow Politics
October 23, 2008 – November 22, 2008
“In art or cars, speed can be tragic; drawing demands complying with one road sign only: STOP.”
Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce Slow Politics, a show of new work by Marco Maggi. The exhibition opens with a cocktail reception with the artist on Thursday, October 23, from 6 to 8 p.m. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by the artist and art critic Luis Camnitzer will be published later this year.
The show presents a diverse body of work that reveals the artist’s continuing exploration of the medium of drawing, whether he is wielding a razor-sharp X-acto knife or an engraver’s burin, or just a soft lead pencil, whether he is using aluminum foil or Plexiglas or powdery white clayboard as a support. All of the images share Maggi’s concern for control and precision, an effort that not only requires him to work slowly, or stop, but that requires that his viewers do the same, that we slow down and stop, to really look...
This, in fact, is a politics of going slow. As Maggi himself has recently observed, his art serves as a corrective to the bombardment of information we receive in our daily lives:
Every day we watch CNN without noticing the difference between a live transmission and death. News percussion prevents any repercussion of the news. An overdose of drama is the perfect anesthetic, a more efficient tool of censorship than a pair of scissors. We are setting up a society of dysfunctional information: reality becomes illegible and the visual arts, invisible. Understanding less is my profession. Understanding less and less demands rigorous training. Not understanding is healthy: when we do not understand we doubt, we feel insecure. We reduce the speed of our decisions, we expand our attention, and we are subtle and very cautious. In art or cars, speed can be tragic; drawing demands complying with one road sign only: STOP.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957, Marco Maggi received his MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 1998. Over the past decade, his images have appeared in major one-person and group exhibitions across the United States, Europe and Latin America, most recently “Uncoordinated” (Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati) and “New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930-2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions” (Museum of Modern Art, New York), both held in 2008. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, among them MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Daros Foundation in Zurich, and the Patricia Cisneros Collection. This will be Maggi’s third solo exhibition at Sicardi Gallery.
For more information on Marco Maggi, contact Sicardi Gallery at sicardi@sicardi.com or 713.529.1313.